Best Vehicle Wrap
Installer NZ

We are extremely proud to have won the 3M All Wraps Challenge 2024 and earn the title of New Zealand’s Best Vehicle Wrap Installer!

This challenge was an opportunity for the best in the industry to showcase their craftsmanship, innovation and creativity. We were thrilled that Emirates Team New Zealand’s AC75 race boat, a labour of love for our team, took out the top spot. Read more about this project below.

Congratulations to everyone that entered – we have a thriving industry of creative and super talented individuals that is second to none.

Thank you to Computaleta once again for your extremely innovative marketing campaigns and relentless commitment to the signmaking industry. We’d also like to acknowledge 3M for their technically advanced products and innovation. 

AC75 America's Cup

About the winning project

We sat with Emirates Team New Zealand CEO Grant Dalton one afternoon to discuss his vision of what the 37th America’s Cup was going to look like. The word that kept coming up was “The Future”.

We came up with four different designs that visually resembled what the future may feel like. Out of those four designs, he struggled to pick just one, but after much consultation and discussion, the electronic wave was the look that was determined. From that point, we had to wait several months for the boat to take shape, so that we could visualise how we were to lay the graphics up, from our 2D image that we’ve drawn to applying a finished self-adhesive graphic to a 3D surface, with multiple concave and strikingly long convex curves.

The product choice we used for 3M 180mC with no overlaminate.

This is the first time in the history of the America’s Cup that a race boat has a vinyl wrapped decal. Previously it’s been a cut-and-mask process with paint and clear coat. We used this self-adhesive vinyl because of the time factor involved in reproducing the graphic with an airbrush, which was more important than the weight discrepancy.

The process was so technical that all of the graphics were weighed with the backing paper on, and once the graphic has been laid onto the boats, the backing paper was weighed and subtracted to determine the exact weight of the vinyl on the boat.

Uniquely, no overlaminate was used; instead, a very thorough experimental process was done with Resene Automotive. We printed up six 1m-square patches of the print and Resene carried out tests to find out which of their clear gloss finish coats adhered the best to our vinyl graphic, without dissolving inks, or disrupting the adhesive on the back.

The technical side of this process was not only in the choice of the materials, but how they perform with many other materials that we were up against. We went through extensive trialing with different vinyls to see which one had the best adhesion and conformability onto the raw satin carbon fibre of the hull.

Application was no mean feat. The decals for both sides of the 75-foot long boat were printed in one piece. Our challenge was that in the mid-section of the hull, our vinyl wasn’t wide enough to wrap over the gunnel and down to the chime. So during the application process, a heating technique was used to expand the width of the graphic in that mid-section area – which spanned over 4 metres – to grow the vinyl.

Not only did we have this issue (which was identified and planned out pre-production), but we had to contend with multiple surface changes in shape from convex to concave areas that challenged us so not to disrupt the overall visual look of the graphic from 20 metres away.

Once the graphic was applied, we left it for 48 hours and returned to the race boat, and re-heated tensioned areas and focused on the adhesion along the chime line. Once we felt confident that has maximum adhesion in these areas, and we had reverse heated the mid-section of the boat that had been put through its maximum stretching process, the painters came through behind us and sprayed an extremely thin coat of Resene Clear over the top for two reasons:

  • To give an overall uniform look to the areas on the hull and the deck that had no paint applied to them as we had used up the weight allocation that was allowed for on the exterior of the hull with our vinyl graphic, as vinyl is heavier than paint.
  • To give a fully-sealed surface on the chime of the boat, especially in the aft area where it hits speeds of 50 knots+ in the rough Barcelona seas.

This was a very technically-driven project with materials being carefully chosen. The weight of the materials played a significant role in the way the graphic was produced and how the boat was finished. The final outcome gave us the visual effect that Emirates Team New Zealand was looking for.

If you are looking for unique and customised graphics to advertise your business, contact the best vehicle wrap installers!